Slavery before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884

5. Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget

5 / Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget The physical face of the plantation and its complex human geography were nowhere to be seen by the end of the eighteenth century. A new landscape, a succession of generations with new political concerns, and the dispersion of the descendants of the indigenous and the enslaved undercut the durable materiality and means of transmitting social memory . Yet today, Sylvester Manor and Shelter Island are places steeped in their own history, where residents pay particular attention to the time of settlement by the first generation of Sylvesters. How is the story of that time told? What parts are remembered, and what is forgotten? As I investigate these questions, I rely on a particular set of ideas about what memory is and how it relates to the construction of historical narratives. History, like memory, is a construction of associations. Historical narratives may be written to make explicit connections to larger themes and discourses that are valorized. That is, if a local event is compared or related to more famed historical movements, then its importance is amplified, and a connection is forged in the minds of the readers between the local and the more global (Sahlins 2005). But narratives may also be written to sever certain associations, especially if they either raise uncomfortable questions or are linked to infamous events. O’Brien’s (2010) exploration of “lasting” narratives is a prime example of this separation. Accounts of the “last of the (tribe name)” are frequently found in local histories, arguably as a means of distancing local identity from present discourses that were unwanted, difficult, or distasteful to Anglo-Americans, such as heterogeneity in the community on the one 122 / forgetting to remember, remembering to forget hand and uneasiness with the treatment of American Indians on the other. Likewise, the taint of racial prejudices or support of slavery was deflected by either ignoring the practice of slavery in northern colonies or claiming the distance of time from when the “last slave,” who very often conveniently disappeared into the mists of history, was freed (Melish 1998). In New England and New York, specific historical narrative forms were created to disassociate the region from those troublesome and ongoing events in other regions of the new nation, like slavery and Indian removals, as though there were never a time when the founding figures of New England engaged in such morally suspect practices. According to Maurice Halbwachs (1992), even individual memory is bound up in one’s community. That is, without a community in which memory can circulate and be strengthened, personal memory is fallible and ephemeral. But if a community is needed to maintain and transmit memory, then changes in a community over time impact the perspective and selective transmission of memory as well. Rather than a static storage of an objectively descriptive narrative, memories transmitted from the past (including both oral transmission and the creation and maintenance of archives) are actively incorporated into narratives that perform values or identity. Philosopher Michel de Certeau argued that narration and practice are fundamentally associated. Narration itself is a practice wherein one’s histories or actions are made coherent to oneself through a performative act of narration. The point of the narration is not what it describes, but the act of giving structure to that which is learned or experienced. He draws a distinction between description, which merely represents, and narration, which actually produces, quite often in a goaloriented strategic or tactical manner. For example, he points to “the recitation of the oral tradition . . . it is a way of re-telling the consequences and combinations of formal operations, along with an art of ‘harmonizing ’ them with the circumstances and with the audience” (Certeau 1984, 80). Thus, any particular historical narrative involves the selection of elements of the past lending authenticity while performing a specific set of associations with which to identify. Historical memory is enacted through a complex negotiation among a community of transmitters and their concerns. By considering the drastic refacing of the eighteenth-century plantation landscape and material culture we now have a better understanding of what kinds of material traces or reminders were lost or destroyed. The community also was disrupted by its virtual abandonment, breaking the links of generations who would have experienced the plantation even through its transformation. forgetting to remember, remembering to forget / 123 Not all aspects of the plantation were forgotten, however. A significant...